1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of data processing systems. More particularly, this invention relates to data processing systems using register renaming to map between architectural registers and physical registers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is known to provide data processing systems which utilize register renaming to map architectural register specifiers within instructions of a program stream into physical register specifiers for execution using a set of physical registers. Such register renaming is useful in facilitating techniques such as out-of-order processing when seeking high performance operation. Within systems employing register renaming in this way, it is also known that at least some of the program instructions to be executed will be speculative in the sense that, at the time when register renaming is performed, whether or not those instructions will be properly executed depends upon some unresolved condition. As an example, a conditional branch instruction may be encountered and a branch prediction made with program instructions from the predicted branch target then being speculatively executed. If it turns out that the branch was mispredicted, then those speculatively executed post-branch instructions should not have been executed and it is necessary to recover the processor state to that preceding the branch instruction such that the appropriate proper program instruction sequence can be followed. In order to achieve this when register remapping mechanisms are used, it is known to store recovery data to enable the previous state to be retrieved.
An independent technique known within data processing systems, particularly those requiring high reliability, is the use of an error correcting code (ECC) mechanism in respect of data values returned from memory. Physical or soft errors can arise resulting in corruption of data values and these can be detected, and possibly corrected, by techniques such as ECC or parity checking. If such errors are detected, then incorrect processing based upon the corrupted data value can be prevented.